Welcome to the vi Renaissance

Excerpt

Vi is a way of life that started in 1976. Its philosophy has influenced software ranging from shells to web browsers. Thirty five years later the ubiquitous editor has seen a resurgence in popularity among developers. See what is drawing power users back to their vi roots.

Description

Vi was born when Bill Joy created a visual interface to the ex line editor in 1976. Since then, vi has found its way into the hearts of many sysadmins as the de facto editor on unix systems. With its roots in ed and ex, learning vi can teach its users the basics of these rudimentary unix tools and many others at the same time.

In the early nineties, a vi clone named vim was created. This brought the vi mindset to a wider range of platforms and users. Many developers and sysadmins alike now use vim to do their daily text editing.

The power of the modal interface is what makes vi special. Its influence has inspired shells like Bash and zsh to offer a vi mode, and most readline enabled applications support it as well. Browsers like uzbl have native support for vi key bindings while Vimperator/Pentadactyl make Firefox a modal browser.

Learn the vi way. Be efficient.

Speaking experience

Speaker

Biography

Clayton is a Python programmer out of Indianapolis Indiana. Working with Six Feet Up, he has honed his craft while hacking on the CMSPlone. He is a member of the Plone Foundation and has contributed to many open source projects.

In another life, Clayton was a systems administrator. This is where his love of vim and zsh was born. He has an extensive set of dotfiles that help he and his team be more productive when working from the command line.